Could a genuinely good, or genuinely funny, movie ever be made about two women who operate a
phone-sex line?

It isn’t something to rule out. Movies with similarly raunchy premises —
Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), for example — have managed to be both funny and filthy.
But, even if a good phone-sex movie does exist,
For a Good Time, Call . . . isn’t it.

To be fair, the movie isn’t entirely about phone sex. It’s about the shallowest female
friendship to hit screens since, well, pretty much ever.Twenty-somethings Lauren and Katie become
roommates in Katie’s too-good-to-be-true apartment overlooking the Gramercy Park neighborhood of
New York. Lauren (played by Seth Rogen’s wife, Lauren Miller, who also wrote the script with Katie
Anne Naylon) is a high-strung, pearl-wearing priss whose boyfriend, as the movie opens, dumps her
for being “too boring.” Then she loses her job.Katie (Ari Graynor), on the other hand, is a
pole-dancing bombshell who moonlights as a phone-sex operator.

When mutual friend Jesse (a flamboyant Justin Long) blindly sets up the women to live together,
they are horrified, as they have long harbored a mutual hatred as the result of an unfortunate
incident in college. But when Lauren hears Katie having way too much fun from her bedroom one
night, she decides she doesn’t want to be boring anymore. She wants a piece of the action.

Then, magically, the girls become the best of friends. And the movie explodes in a dreadfully
maligned orgy of hot-pink telephones, frilly undergarments, gratuitous bosom-bumping, leopard-print
dresses and — OMG! — matching tote bags.

It’s a small miracle that the action stops short of a naked pillow fight. This “bramance” —
ostensibly aimed at turning the “bromance” genre championed by Miller’s husband on its head — is
really just a stereotypical male fantasy incarnate.

Yes, we want Lauren to loosen up and Katie to find true love. And there are a few bright moments
along the way. But, with the exception of Katie’s endearing if improbable love interest, Sean (Mark
Webber), and a gratifying Rogen cameo, none of the characters is likable enough to pull for — or
even laugh at. The script’s clunky cobbling of obvious exposition and one-liners might be partly to
blame. But director Jamie Travis could also have done far more to poke fun at the leads rather than
allow them to live unmolested in their rosy bubble of phone orgasms.